2015 Translation Machinery in Health & Disease Gordon Research Conference

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by the applicant): This application requests partial support for a meeting on Translation Machinery in Health & Disease - Protein Synthesis and Beyond as part of the Gordon Research Conference series to be held in Ventura, California, on February 22-27, 2015. This Conference is a new GRC and the first disease-focused, interdisciplinary conference for the broad field of translation. The conference fills a niche that is not addressed by any existing conferences on translation and the translation machinery, which mainly focus on structures of the translation machinery, and its specific functions and regulations in protein synthesis, and not on the "new biology" of this same machinery, the pathological consequence of an altered translation apparatus, or on how translation regulates diverse systems in humans. However, GRC presently has no meeting devoted to translation per se. This circumstance provides an excellent opportunity to develop, under the auspices of the GRC, a new conference to bridge translation to health and disease. The broad and long-term goal of the conference is to deepen our understanding of translation and its connection to health and disease, and to open doors to developing novel treatments and therapies. The conference will cover many disease areas including cancer, neurological diseases, immunological diseases, infectious diseases, hematological and vascular diseases, metabolic diseases, and mitochondrial diseases. The conference will present for the first time a forum for clinicians and basic scientists to discuss their distinct but overlapping interests in these translation-related molecules and diseases. The specific aims of this meeting are to convene 38-46 leading experts that cover critical basic science and clinical topics, with a total of 150 participants, for a five-day meeting. The meeting will be organized into nine sessions including an opening session on the first day featuring 2 keynote lectures, followed by 8 sessions that each focus on a specific disease area. Four additional keynote lectures will start each day for the remaining 4 days of the conference, to provide high-level introductions on topics that are relevant for the day's sessions. The keynote lectures will be given by Drs. Ada Yonath, Paul Schimmel, Nahum Sonenberg and Jonathan Weissman, with two more to be announced. Among them, Dr. Yonath is a Nobel laureate best known for her groundbreaking work on the structure and function of ribosomes; Dr. Schimmel is the most renowned scientist in the tRNA synthetase field, and an entrepreneur who has transferred basic science into therapies through many successful biotechnology companies that he has founded. In addition, four afternoon poster sessions will permit all participants to contribute to the meeting. As with all Gordon Conferences there will be numerous opportunities for young investigators, women, and minorities to interact with senior leaders in the field. As the first disease-focused conference for the field of translation, this conference would significantly impact our understanding of many important diseases-such as autoimmune myositis, cancer, neurodegeneration, diabetes, anemia, and viral and bacterial infections-and their treatment.